The New York Times is claiming that one of its reporters has salvaged classified documents that were part of an internal United States military investigation of the 2005 Haditha Massacre, one of the pivotal events of the Iraq War.

Photo source: New York Times.

If the New York Times claim is confirmed, it would suggest that U.S. military forces have engaged in a deliberate policy of destroying important legal and historical records.

Historians of warfare and society should be deeply concerned about the implications of this story. There seems to be a possibility that the U.S. military is destroying massive collections of documentary source material of vital importance for current and future historians of the Iraq War. U.S. military documents from the Iraq War should instead be destined for the National Archives of the United States.